With the rollback of the Voting Rights Act this month and a wave of restrictive policies targeting certain American voters, I recalled a lesson from a Wesleyan professor on how to write an effective piece of memoir.
Two of the professor’s tips helped our submissions hit harder, especially when no personal expertise or famous name provided
a rationale for reading us or giving us a million likes. The suggestions? Have
the other characters speak, at least once—their lines of dialogue can be
proximate and not word-for-word exact. Secondly, blend into the writing some
public event—something that had made the papers around the time of the memoir’s
setting—to ground the reader in history, especially if the memoirist themself is not a well-known personality.
Here’s my example:
I was three years old when, on May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education made integrated education in America the law of the land.
Some states did their best to pretend they hadn’t heard the
news.
I lived in a Long Island community whose school board was
paid to set up one model integrated classroom a few years later. By random
assignment, I began first grade in that classroom. Looking back now, I see why
our class met in a classroom at a Jewish temple far from the comprehensive
elementary school in town. Although the synagogue was elegantly nestled into some
tree-filled acreage, the temple was also located near a series of dilapidated
streets in the downtown area.
During class hours, we learned what every first grader did.
We went outdoors for recess, where I read books on the sidewalk while more
active girls jumped rope. We pledged allegiance to the flag,
practiced the box step in pairs, and helped each other learn math.
By 1959, American class photos were taken in color. When I
brought mine home, my older brother—himself the product of white-only
classrooms for nine years longer than I’d been alive—mocked me for “being in
love with” the black boy who had been posed by height next to me. To be accused
of being in love was the insult I took away; it was years later that I understood
that the well-dressed, smiling second grader named Sammy who stood next to me
was, to my brother, the joke.
In third grade, my classmates and I were folded back into the
elementary school. Right away, we experienced a change. All white boys, even the ones we’d had to help over and
over again to multiply or to sound out words, got assigned seats in the front
four rows of class. Behind them were the
white girls. Our black classmates were assigned to seats in the last row. On the
playground, the black girls’ Double Dutch tournaments were gradually elbowed
over to the far end of the field, until they went on as if held in a foreign
country. Close to the school were the cemented-in equipment and the running
games organized by white kids. We waved to former classmates as we passed each
other in the hall, until our assimilation into the new place was completed. A day
came when I was standing at the far end of the playground, saying goodbye to a
new (white) friend who had to go home early.
A former classmate called out to me from the sandy field to
ask if I’d turn ropes for her jumping game, as they were down one turner. I did
an adequate job until it was my turn to jump. Again, I was more of a reader than a jumper.
“Just jump in,” my old classmate encouraged, but I
hesitated, and when the ropes stopped turning abruptly, my hesitant entry resulted in me crying on the ground. I’d broken my arm.
I cried. My old classmate came rushing to me and cried with
me. It felt good that she’d come to my side.
Hearing that someone was hurt, the teacher assigned to
monitor the playground that day rushed towards us.
“What did you do?” she shouted at my old classmate. That
teacher, all sympathy toward me, helped me stand and then circled my waist with
her arm as she led me to the nurse’s office.
My old classmate and
I only had time to look at each other briefly before the teacher escorted me
away. In that look, we admitted to each other that our new teachers had little we wanted to learn from them.
As the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education comes
around this May, I share this bit of history, especially with those kids who
started school when I did, when integrated education lit the way to an America that
has turned back to something as disappointing and confusing as my brother’s
jarring reaction to that class photo. We went to the Moon more easily than we
repaired inequality. And now we’ve gone again toward the Moon, without once shaking
our fists at the rocket ship, and shouting, “What have you done to us?”
